WI Schools Plan Massive Layoffs After Walker Guts Funding

[HI54UNI]

Teachers will get **** over, while administrators get fat. There is a **** ton of waste in education budgets. If money were the solution, Baltimore City students would be tops in the state.

Too bad admins have taken over Big Education. I looked at the local school budget and about 27% goes to teachers. IMO, teachers should get more than the admin. My dad went to country school and it was managed by the school board, no other admin. His generation turned out just fine. That's not possible with today's schools, but they are over managed with admin layer on top of admin layer.

I find it hard to believe that only 27% of a school's budget is going to teachers. Is that their total budget including things such as capital projects?

[Gil Dobie]

Too bad admins have taken over Big Education. I looked at the local school budget and about 27% goes to teachers. IMO, teachers should get more than the admin. My dad went to country school and it was managed by the school board, no other admin. His generation turned out just fine. That's not possible with today's schools, but they are over managed with admin layer on top of admin layer.

I find it hard to believe that only 27% of a school's budget is going to teachers. Is that their total budget including things such as capital projects?

It was the total budget, not sure about the capital projects though.

[Ibanez]

What percentage of the UWs budget comes from the state? I ask because a while ago, there was similar talk in South Carolina and it was brought up that schools would have to shut down. These groups called out Coastal Carolina. Coastal responded by saying 4% of their budget comes from the state and they'd be able to handle the reduction with minimal issues (and they did). So what is the other side of this story, that side that we all know thinkprogress.com ignored/conveniently left out?

[HI54UNI]

People overcome shitty parents all of the time, and many people overcome their, "socio economics" situation as well.

So, besides the fact that HI5 completely discredited your pop psychology theory, what would you do to improve the situation...overspend non-wisely?

There's very little wrong with the US education system if you live in the right district or have solid parents (preferably two of them).

If you try reading between the lines (they taught that at DU, right?) you'd see I'm recognizing that more spending isn't the answer. And yes, I'm sure there are exceptions like both you and HI5 point out.

It's a complex problem to solve but a few of the ideas I've mentioned before:

Move kids into a vocational or higher learning path at a relatively early age. Those who show academic interest continue toward college, those who do not end up graduating high school ready for decent paying job in the trades or service industries.

Mandatory after school activities. If not athletics, then extended learning opportunities or simply staying current with homework. Less latch-keyism and kids have all of their homework done by 5:00 instead of two hours of xbox. Learning moves on at a faster clip.

Mandatory masters degrees within 5 years of being hired for all teachers. Helps weed out the underachievers.

I agree with your first suggestion.

Expanding after school programs can be a way to make education better. That is one of things the schools that are successful in overcoming poverty and the shitty home life try to do. I don't agree with the mandatory part though and it would take a massive change in funding and collective bargaining laws to accomplish this. Don't want to make the teachers work an extra 30-60 minutes every day.

I disagree with the last one. A master's degree does not make a better teacher. Additional training, peer review, mentoring from senior teachers, and proper oversight by administrators will do more good IMO.

[GannonFan]

There's very little wrong with the US education system if you live in the right district or have solid parents (preferably two of them).

If you try reading between the lines (they taught that at DU, right?) you'd see I'm recognizing that more spending isn't the answer. And yes, I'm sure there are exceptions like both you and HI5 point out.

It's a complex problem to solve but a few of the ideas I've mentioned before:

Move kids into a vocational or higher learning path at a relatively early age. Those who show academic interest continue toward college, those who do not end up graduating high school ready for decent paying job in the trades or service industries.

Mandatory after school activities. If not athletics, then extended learning opportunities or simply staying current with homework. Less latch-keyism and kids have all of their homework done by 5:00 instead of two hours of xbox. Learning moves on at a faster clip.

Mandatory masters degrees within 5 years of being hired for all teachers. Helps weed out the underachievers.

I agree with your first suggestion.

Expanding after school programs can be a way to make education better. That is one of things the schools that are successful in overcoming poverty and the shitty home life try to do. I don't agree with the mandatory part though and it would take a massive change in funding and collective bargaining laws to accomplish this. Don't want to make the teachers work an extra 30-60 minutes every day.

I disagree with the last one. A master's degree does not make a better teacher. Additional training, peer review, mentoring from senior teachers, and proper oversight by administrators will do more good IMO.

I'd be worried about the vocational decision being made too early. I wouldn't want to be like China and have kids work lives determined by the sixth grade. I think the same thing can be accomplished, though, by improving the vocational education at the high school level and doing more to bring that into the schools rather than a magnet location outside of the school proper. We still do vocational training like it was done in the '80's and it's not attractive enough for enough students to work correctly.

I'm all for expanding school programs to after-school, but you have to make sure that it is well run and well staffed. Too many times you have very young adults with no real training running programs like this and you end up just having it be a chaotic daycare-type thing. If done right, however that would be very powerful.

As for the advanced degrees, frankly, I don't see the point. Take PA for instance, in this state teachers do need to get certain continuing ed updates in the way of credits and degrees within certain timeframes. Heck, most districts pay a substantial amount of the costs for these courses and many will reward more depending on the grade the teacher receives in the course. However, there's a cottage industry now of colleges, fully understanding that teachers need to take these courses, that compete to offer courses with minimal class time, work involved, or actual learning, but exist so that the teachers can check off their requirement even though they may get little to nothing out of it. And in the end, now you have a whole bunch of teachers that just move to the right on the salary schedule because now they have the bachelor plus 20 or a masters or a masters plus 20 and so on. They may not be any better of a teacher, but they passed the requirements laid out, and the state colleges pocketed a lot of money that they wouldn't have otherwise. Gee, kinda sounds a lot like our current national student loan debacle.

I like continuing education, but it needs to be much better targeted and worthwhile. There's a state writing project in PA (I think it's national as well) that does a very thorough education of teachers on how to teach writing, and supposedly teacher that go through the program are considered "writing fellows" and should be able to bring that learning back to their districts and teach others. And the Teachers College at Columbia University (Lucy Calkins is a prof there) does tons of stuff through the year, including twice a year "reunions" for teachers where they really do a great job of networking and disseminating a lot of insight in terms of what works and what doesn't from a teaching perspective. Schools would be much better served if they could leverage resources like that rather than just falling back on a nebulous, one size fits all "let's all get a master's degree" - the latter is just government clumsiness, the former is something that could actually work and benefit kids.